No recognition for the nobel dead?
LEAVING A LEGACY: Pakistan’s ‘Father Teresa’ served the poor and sick consistently despite criticism
SINCE 1974, the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously. Earlier, five-time nominee M.K. (Mahatma) Gandhi, dubbed an “agitator” against the British Empire, was ignored. After he led India to freedom, his 1948 assassination became an excuse. It was acknowledged only in 2006 that not Gandhi without Nobel, but Nobel without Gandhi was inadequate.
Nominated by compatriot Malala Yousafzai, Pakistan’s Abdul Sattar Edhi, who died on July 8, will also not get the Nobel. Not that the winner of Gandhi, Lenin and Magsaysay awards, besides Pakistan’s Nishane-Imtiaz, hankered for any.
Born in Bantwa, not far from Gandhi’s birthplace Porbandar in Gujarat, Edhi, unlike Gandhi, had not challenged any empire. Imbibing many things Gandhian, like piety, public service and non-violence, he had practised them in worse conditions than Gandhi could perhaps have imagined.
In time line, he started where Gandhi had left in a country now divided. The penniless Partition survivor carried with him the pain of having failed to keep his sick mother alive. That set his life’s mission.
Gandhi had a political agenda; Edhi had none. Both worked for the poorest. But, Edhi lived among them. One of Gandhi’s lieutenants, Sarojini Naidu, joked once: “To keep Mahatma Gandhi poor, we have to destroy treasures. His poverty is very costly.”
Possessing just two pairs of clothes, Edhi led a spartan life amidst Karachi’s squalor despite millions in charity the Edhi Foundation received.
Compared with India’s globally known Nobel laureate Mother Teresa, who was but Albania-born, Edhi worked against bigger odds. Many like Maharashtra’s Baba Amte have served India’s poor and sick, but Indians seem surprisingly unaware of Edhi. This was also true of Kailash Satyarthi till he won the Nobel along with Malala.
Edhi started an ambulance service over six decades back by begging, literally. His charitable network runs Pakistan’s largest fleet of private ambulances, and rescues and supports a remarkable range of people, from abandoned babies to orphans, abused women, the old, impaired, even the dead.
The little cradle outside every Edhi Centre carries a placard imploring: “Do not commit another sin: leave your baby in our care.” He saved over 35,000 babies. This practice brought him into conflict with religious leaders. They claimed that adopted children could not inherit their parents’s wealth. Edhi told them their objections contradicted the supreme idea of Islam.
Relief work never ceased even during natural calamities. Journalist Sami Shah writes of Edhi’s work in a rain-submerged Karachi. The death toll was “higher than the ruling political party could allow”.
“They knew they couldn’t stop people from dying, so they instead stopped the ambulances from collecting the dead — the toll would not rise if there were no more bodies to count.”
The authorities and politicians called him to stop. No television channel ran the story. Yet, Edhi kept working, “personally collecting the corpses, knowing they would not kill him. Anyone else they would have”.
The red and white logo on his ambulances has been a hope-instilling icon of commitment and consistency. He once said: “There are many who ask me: why must you pick up Christians and Hindus in your ambulance?” His reply: “Because the
runs the country’s largest fleet of private ambulances and rescues without prejudice. ambulance is more Muslim than you.”
His autobiography, published in 1996, records how he recovered stinking cadavers “from rivers, from inside wells, from road sides, accident sites and hospitals”. “When families forsook them, and authorities threw them away, I picked them up. Then I bathed and cared for each and every victim of circumstance.”
Edhi annoyed the Muslim clergy who said that he did not pray. He angered those unleashing ethnic strife that has made Karachi notorious because he treated all groups equally. While authorities feared to tread, only Edhi Foundation’s ambulances could reach the dead and injured, whatever their faith, ethnic or political identity.
“There is more hostility towards us from the religious and political groups,” his wife Bilquis once complained. But, Edhi remained unfazed by aggressive political parties or the mullahs’ claim that he was an atheist who would not be allowed into heaven.
“I will not go to paradise where these types of people go. I will go to heaven where the poor and miserable people live,” he told The Guardian newspaper last year.
At 88, despite kidney failure, he refused to be flown abroad for treatment by the land’s high and mighty. His weary body was donated, but only the corneas will give vision to someone. It would have been apt if the last journey was in one of the ambulances. But, in an unmistakable irony, his body lay on a ceremonial gun carriage.
The funeral, complete with 19 gun salutes, was organised by the State that had largely let him be. It was attended by the country’s president and the military chiefs. An all-military affair, it divided the powerful and the poor by erecting barbed wire fences.
Edhi’s views had become “increasingly antithetical to the country he grew old in”, Dawn newspaper said. “If Edhi’s values were superimposed on the Pakistani state, Pakistan would indisputably be closer to the vision of its founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.” There cannot be a bigger tribute.
But Edhi’s legacy is already under attack. Son and chief aide, Faisal, alleges a campaign by “mullahs and capitalists” asking people not to give charity to the foundation.
The love-hate relationship Edhi had with his compatriots compares with what Malala faces. Far from being empathised for what she went through, she is maligned. Her winning Nobel is admired by some, but seen as a “Western conspiracy” by others. She is accused of becoming rich by writing books and giving speeches to promote peace.
Edhi is gone — his work lives on. Malala lives in far-away England, keen to return home some day. The two remain reminders to Pakistan’s collective conscience.
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